Express & Star comment: Government owes the hospitality sector

The Government owes them. In these terrible times, hotels have been doing their bit to help in practical ways, with some taking in homeless people from the streets, and others housing essential workers, or being ready to act as hospitals or medical units if required.

And still they don't know when they will be able to get going again. They have watched as the rest of the world warily begins to awake from its enforced big sleep and restart economic activity. Slowly, and not that surely, Britain is getting back to work again, non-essential shops have reopened, and the nation's economic engine is at last turning once more.

Yet not for hotels, pubs, and restaurants. For them, the lockdown continues, without any confirmed date for a restart, although July 4 seems to be pencilled in as a target.

There are special challenges. Hotels provide accommodation for a rolling cast of strangers from all over the world, and from all over the country. They are part of the tourism and travel industry. Travel spreads the virus, which was a key reason for the lockdown and for countries across the world closing their borders.

A hotel room could have guests from America one week, and guests from China the next. While the clampdown on international travel currently rules that out, if and when things return to "normal," that is the sort of scenario which hotels will have to ensure can be managed safely.

They are being hit not just through a lack of guests, but an inability to host functions like conferences and weddings.

In all things, where there is a will, there is a way. Hotels, restaurants, and bars are responsible enterprises in which those running them know their businesses, so if the Government set them free to devise ways to operate in coronavirus safety, they would find creative, yet effective, ways to do so, and indeed many are already on the case.

Or just tell them what they must do. What they need is for the Government to put its faith in the sector's ability to implement, or come up with, solutions which command public confidence and minimise risk.

Give them a chance, and they will respond.